Like most industries in the early ’70s, radio offered women few opportunities for advancement. But Edie Hilliard had a dream that wouldn’t be denied — and good timing.

Hilliard landed her first job in radio in 1972 — the same year Congress passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.

The new law helped to remove old barriers, opening the door for Hilliard to work her way upward until she achieved her goal of running a radio station. She later trumped that by overseeing programming for the largest independent radio network in the country.

“A lot of what happens to us (depends on) what doors are open at what time in our lives,” said Hilliard. Without the EEO Act, it “would have been tougher, maybe even impossible,” for her career to reach the heights it did, she said.

Before starting her radio career, Hilliard taught high school English. She made the jump to radio in 1972, taking a promotions job with Kaye-Smith Radio, in Portland. She was quickly smitten with the creativity and excitement of radio and decided she wanted to manage a station someday.

Against the backdrop of the EEO Act, her boss and the company’s owner encouraged Hilliard’s dream by suggesting she pursue a sales opening at KJR-AM, a popular Seattle top-40 station owned by Kaye-Smith. “It was very hard,” Hilliard said. “I started with no (client) list and almost quit twice during my first year in sales, but by the end of the year, I really hit my stride and found out I enjoyed it and was good at it.”

Within two years, she was promoted to sales manager, becoming one of the first women to hold that position in a major market.

“I wasn’t thinking about being a woman who was opening the door for other women,” Hilliard said. “I was doing it for me. But within 10 years, nearly half of the radio sales people in Seattle were women. It really did break a logjam.”

Hilliard realized her goal of becoming a station manager — and broke another gender barrier — in 1981 when she took the reins at another Seattle station, KING-AM. Two years later, she left to develop and market the Salmon System, a computerized account management system based on a manual process she devised at KJR.

In 1987, she became president of Broadcast Programming, a Seattle company that provided syndicated programming to radio stations. Under her leadership, the company acquired nine competitors, changed formats from tape to digital and launched numerous new programs beginning with the hit show “Delilah.”

After Jones Media Networks acquired the company in 1999, Hilliard became vice president and chief operating officer responsible for providing programming to 5,000 stations — the largest independent network in the country. In 2005, she took a similar position with GreenStone Media and helped launch a network of talk programming aimed at women before retiring in 2007.

Radio Ink magazine named Hilliard the “Most Influential Woman in Radio” in 2000, but that’s not her proudest achievement.

“I think I’m proudest of the fact that I was able to attract and keep really talented people working for me,” Hilliard said. “You need to encourage, coach and question them, and then let them do their jobs.”